Joe Biden: Losing my vote

Energy is my primary issue in this presidential campaign, and I remain undecided.  Both candidates are flawed on the issues of energy, as I have written about in the past (for example, here and here).  I think Palin is the best of all four principles on energy, but Obama’s past support for CTL actually had me leaning his way.  However, I found his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate to be intensely disheartening.  The conventional wisdom is that McCain’s selection of Palin is the “game changer” in this election, but I don’t share those feelings.  She has a steep learning curve on foreign policy, but so what?  She’s not running for Secretary of State, and conventional picks like Pawlenty or Romney did not have a lot of foreign policy experience, either.  There are other issues and, of course, chief among them in my eyes is energy.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is just an awful pick.  He is the quintessential career political hack.  For a candidate running on the notion that he will change the way things work in Washington, it was the most cynical pick imaginable, more so than McCain’s pandering to identity politics, IMHO.  Still, as unctuous and reliably wrong as Biden has always been (he’s such a fossil that he has been in the Senate long enough to have voted against the original Alaska Oil Pipeline in the 1970s), I could have held my nose and voted for Obama anyway.  But today, Biden gave away the game when he declared “no coal plants for America.”  Do the freakin’ math, Joe.  There is no way to increase electrical capacity in th nation without coal fired plants. abd we must increase capacity, especially with the coming advent of PHEVs.  Biden is either an inane panderer, or a bumbling idiot.  My guess is the latter.

This was such a colossally bad selection by Obama.  Had he chosen Hillary, this election would be over.  For that matter, had the Dems nominated Hillary to begin with, it would be over.  For all the talk about McCain’s judgement in selecting the perhaps-too-green Palin, it is Obama’s judgement in selecting this fool that is really open to question.